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Calculus Textbook Author James Stewart Has Died
Onnimikki writes James Stewart, author of the calculus textbooks many of us either loved or loved to hate, has died. In case you ever wondered what the textbook was funding, this story has the answer: a $32 million dollar home over-looking a ravine in Toronto, Canada.
... Figures.
Having passed away, since Mr Stewart can no longer update the textbook every year or so, does this mean that this Calculus text will finally stabilize, stop being updated, and the prices would drop?
Somehow I greatly resent people who profit massively from kids' math textbooks. He was such a person.
Here's a picture of some Indian kids using a bridge as a school.
Wonder how much toll Stewart would feel they should pay him for the privilege of learning stuff invented by Newton.
http://i.guim.co.uk/static/w-620/h--/q-95/sys-images/Environment/Pix/pictures/2013/9/18/1379522585111/Indian-children-attend-a--008.jpg
+5 funny.
a wonderful life?
rewrite only one chapter in any significant way (or simply add a new chapter somewhere), and then move back to the standard "renumber the pages and exercises" for subsequent "revised" editions.
Rewrite? As in actually revise the text? No way.
I teach out of a thermodynamics text that gets churned every year or so. Never mind that engineering thermodynamics hasn't changed a whit in about a century, but the homework problems get reshuffled. Once in a while they'll actually try to rewrite some of the homework problems, mangling them badly. I redo all of the problems to ensure that the solutions are actually correct (many are not). I'm actually writing many of my own homework problems now and allowing students to purchase any edition of the text that they can find (as the 3rd edition is effectively as good as the 8th edition as far as being a reference to solve problems).
It's pissing me and the students off because they really do need to have a text. However, this churning bullshit and jacking up of prices is actually causing some of the students to try to wing it through the class without a text, which is not going to end well They do need a basic reference for exams and practical problems. But they could probably do fine with a text from 1920 if they were comfortable using it.
Textbook publishers are right up there with advertisers and telephone sanitizers. Shoot the bastards into space and be done with them.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
I learned from that text, and only just unpacked it onto a shelf the other day.
When I eventually grokked (some) calculus it was via his book.
Peace out, James Stewart.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Well, first-year calculus hadn't changed in 250 years, and second-year calculus hadn't changed in 100 years, so I'm guessing the updating isn't going to stop.
I really fucking hate this about academia. It's absolutely shameless to charge college students $244 for a single dumb textbook. It's not even that good. It's just that when a department chooses to standardize on a textbook, the move has inertia and is basically impossible to reverse. Then, the publisher can charge something absurd, and everybody pays it, because it is a required text. It's so dirty, because it's profiteering from people who are often barely making ends meet, and typically buying the book with debt.
What really bothers me is that nobody seems willing to do anything about it. If a big, publicly funded university system set aside some money to create and regularly update their core STEM curriculum textbooks - let's start with Calculus, Physics, GenChem, GenBio - it would certainly cost less than the almost $1000 per student that the textbook purchases cost. These universities have Nobel Prize winners among their faculty, surely they have the in-house resources to create excellent textbooks and distribute them on some sort of open license like CC. Arranging sabbaticals for the authors might cost at most a million dollars, or roughly 4000 Stewart Calculus books. That might be about the number of Calc 1, Phys 1, GenChem and GenBio books that are sold on a single campus in a single year.
But this move would help everybody, not just within the entire UC system that funded the effort, but across the globe. And the costs of updating and embellishing future editions would be far less. I'm so mad that a large university system doesn't just make this happen. And yes, raise fucking tuition by $200 to pay for it, if you absolutely have to. In exchange for textbooks you can have for free (or for printing cost if you don't like digital), everybody will recognize that's a great deal. The courses can explicitly invite students to devise problems for future editions, or to suggest changes and clarifications. And it will bring prestige to the colleges and to the authors, which is worth something too.
Agreed, but I actually don't get paid to publish. I am at a teaching college, and I teach a very full load plus do a number of administrative duties.
Your idea is good, but the unfortunate thing is that anyone who puts that much effort into writing a text is eventually drawn to trying to monetizing it, either themselves or by the institution itself. Also, many accreditation organizations want to see mainstream textbooks used. Nothing technically says you need these books, but things suddenly get difficult during accreditation when they start seeing locally published texts on display. Same with printing off a text from 1920 - completely usable and accurate text, but try to defend the use of a century old text when new textbooks are available? Do you want to risk your program's accreditation because of that?
And this is before all the bullshit you need to wade through with the school bookstore trying to turn a buck. I got yelled at for recommending to my students to buy the course text online vs. going through the bookstore ($40-$60 bucks vs $250 at the bookstore for the same text).
College isn't about learning anymore, it's all about making money.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
When I studied calculus the hardest part was studying calculus, not buying the book. Textbooks were a lot cheaper.
Even cheaper, my math teacher used to organize book-buying from Taiwan.
At that time (1959), there was no copyright agreement between the U.S. and Taiwan (and besides, they were fighting Communism), so it was completely legal.
They cost about a tenth of U.S. prices. The publisher he used had reprints of all the popular math and science books (like Dover, except not limited to to public domain). They had an entire Encyclopedia Britannica for about $25.
Dover of course used to re-publish the out-of-copyright and out-of-print math and science classics. There was a time when a professor could have a rare out-of-print book, that nobody else could get, and teach an entire class out of that book. Dover put an end to that.
Of course the Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Act put an end to Dover (or at least their reprint business) by extending the copyright to 100 years after the author's death.
So the great classics, like Yakov Perelman's Physics for Entertainment (the world's largest-selling physics textbook), are now out of print, even though Perelman died in the siege of Leningrad.
The other source of cheap textbooks was the Soviet Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow, which translated all the great Soviet science and math textbooks, including Perelman's, into every major language of the world, including English, and sold them cheaply everywhere. They were even cheaper than Dover, $2 apiece. And the Soviets didn't believe in copyright, so Dover or anybody could reprint them. I've heard Indian scientists reminisce about how they grew up reading Perelman as children.
It's too bad the Soviet Union didn't survive until the Internet. They could have put all their scientific, literary and music works online copyright-free.
Depressing view. Not saying you're wrong, of course, just that it would be a social good to solve these problems somehow.
This is a good start toward solving the problem: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/onl...
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
It's pissing me and the students off because they really do need to have a text.
How long is this going to be true with resources like Khan Academy, Purple math, and everything else out there?
I am currently pissed at my calculus text(Larson/Edwards 5thEd ETC). While I read the chapters, more than half the book is actually just problems to work out, and worse, the methods to solve said problems are often not in the text. So I'd place my actual learning at about 10% textbook(and I'm being generous), 30% lecture, 20% math tutoring/TA help, 40% internet.
When the teacher is assigning roughly 1/10th of the problems as homework in a manner that often resembles 'this looks good, I like this one', etc... It should be trivial for him to do up said problems on a handout. Well, I'd recommend he make the problems up himself, but you should get the point.
I don't read AC A human right
Well, it seems we're disregarding the actual story in lieu of bitching about textbooks. So here's my story of interest:
My own stupid textbook story is from Statics. The prof listed a textbook, title, version and ISBN. I ordered online to save some cash, everyone else bought from the campus bookstore.
About two weeks in, I've failed every homework problem. Turns out the version that was listed, and the version I had bought, was the METRIC version, while the campus bookstore had ordered the IMPERIAL version, which everyone else, including the professor, had (I checked the ISBNs, mine was right, so either they have two versions under the same number, or the bookstore "corrected" it to the imperial version). The problems were the same, save for the units.
Brief aside: Why the hell is there even an engineering textbook in non-metric units? Who the hell is designing bridges in feet, pounds and slugs? It's probably just to keep American students from buying cheaper foreign copies.
In any case, we worked out a deal - I just copied the text of the problem before showing my work. My grade instantly shot up. Not quite to an A- despite having passed an "Algebra and Trigonometry" class, I'd never actually been taught trig, and was trying to learn it independently for both Statics and Calc II.
Dover of course used to re-publish the out-of-copyright and out-of-print math and science classics. There was a time when a professor could have a rare out-of-print book, that nobody else could get, and teach an entire class out of that book. Dover put an end to that.
Of course the Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Act put an end to Dover (or at least their reprint business) by extending the copyright to 100 years after the author's death.
Does anyone ever bother to fact-check their rants before posting them to Slashdot?
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